IITs To Ditch Startups, Embrace PSUs For This Year's Placement

India's top engineering institutions, the Indian Institutes of Technology are set to give up on the startups and rely more on the state-owned undertakings for this year's campus recruitments. This comes in as a result of the last years recruitment where many students were denied or delayed job offers by many startups which participated in the recruitment process. Many of these startups also went out of business after the hiring process leaving the new recruits high and dry. Some of these even were fake companies.

Despite the PSUs offering much lesser pay than private companies, this year the centrally funded institutions are keen on providing early placement slots to public sector undertakings (PSUs), even from Day 1. Some IITs also have planned to invite about 100 PSUs each with directors and faculty members reaching out to them to ensure they attend.

The IITs also have plans to rope in the HRD Ministry to persuade the Maharatna and Navratna companies to participate in campus placement. These companies are larger compared to the PSUs and are independent in the factor of business and investment decisions.

Some of the PSUs expected to participate in the campus placements are Oil and Natural Gas Corp, Indian Oil Corp, Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd, NMDC and Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd.

"Until last year, we could not bring in PSUs and also many students were opting for startups," said Debasis Deb, chairman of the career development centre at IIT Kharagpur. "Our experience with the startups was not all good last year. This year, we want to bring in PSUs in the first week itself so that students get a chance to opt for stable jobs rather than pick up lucrative offers in startups."

During last placement season, several companies including Peppertap, Zomato, Roadrunnr, Stayzilla and Flipkart had either deferred or withdrawn offers made to students.

Hence, the IITs are ready to give early slots to PSUs for hiring process. The IITs at Kharagpur, Roorkee, Bombay and Guwahati plan to offer them Day 1. Such companies provide rich work experience in core streams.

However, the PSUs offer annual salaries of about Rs 10 lakh on average which is about 1/3rd offered by Day 1 companies. It is not about the salaries alone, it is also about stability says, Anishya Madan, industrail liasion officer at IIT Delhi.